MPPT is a technique that can be used to harvest photovoltaic (PV) power under various environments that grid-tie inverters, solar battery chargers and similar devices to obtain the maximum possible electrical power, typically being power from an array of PV panels. Perturb and observe (P&O) algorithms are the most widely used for MPPT due to their effectiveness and simplicity in application. In P&O a processor-based controller adjusts the output voltage by a small amount (perturbation) from the PV array and then measures (observes) the resulting power. If the power increases due to the perturbation, further adjustments in that same direction are tried until the power no longer increases.
However, conventional P&O with fixed perturbation increments is difficult to generally balance the tracking speed and oscillation requirements. Thus, adaptive P&O techniques are sometimes used to solve these problems. Known adaptive P&O techniques are based on duty cycle modulation for conventional pulse width modulation (PWM) power converters.